In the “gay rights” debate over the years, I have raised the point that the psychiatric and psychological professional associations normalized the condition of homosexuality because of politics, not science. Typically, my claim is greeted with jeers and laughter from skeptical and disdainful opponents.

But truth is truth. When I co-ghost-wrote a book for a former boss, Congressman William E. Dannemeyer, titled Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America, in 1989, I knew the truth about the politics of homosexuality within the psychiatric and psychological professions.

Nine years after the 1973 convention vote within the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Ronald Bayer, a professor at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, in the Mailman School of Public Health, at Columbia University, released a book titled Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. Dr. Bayer supports the change in APA policy to remove homosexuality from the official list of mental disorders. Let me repeat: Dr. Bayer supports homosexuality as a normal human condition and, from everything I can discern, supports “gay rights” generally.

Just to put this issue to rest, here is the opening paragraph of the introduction to his book:

In 1973, after several years of bitter dispute, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association decided to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, its official list of mental diseases. Infuriated by that action, dissident psychiatrists charged the leadership of their association with an unseemly capitulation to the threats and pressures of Gay Liberation groups, and forced the board to submit its decision to a referendum of the full APA membership. And so America’s psychiatrists were called to vote upon the question of whether homosexuality ought to be considered a mental disease. The entire process, from the first confrontations organized by gay demonstrators at psychiatric conventions to the referendum demanded by orthodox psychiatrists, seemed to violate the most basic expectations about how questions of science should be resolved. Instead of being engaged in a sober consideration of the data, psychiatrists were swept up in a political controversy. The American Psychiatric Association had fallen victim to the disorder of a tumultuous era, when disruptive conflicts threatened to politicize every aspect of American social life. A furious egalitarianism that challenged every instance of authority had compelled psychiatric experts to negotiate the pathological status of homosexuality with homosexuals themselves. The result was not a conclusion based on an approximation of the scientific truth as dictated by reason, but was instead an action demanded by the ideological temper of the times.

Of course, this politicization of otherwise professional organizations by homosexuals has unfolded time and time again – the Boy Scouts of America being its current victim. The American Psychological Association followed its APA counterpart just a year or two later in abandoning its concern over homosexuality as a mental disorder – again, because of political pressures from the homosexual movement.

Leaders within the homosexual movement want desperately for the average American to believe that all of the changes within these professional organizations have occurred naturally, without dispute, based on science. They want us to believe that “times change” and modern generations (and science) are simply more enlightened. They also want us to believe that change is inevitable. When, in reality, what’s inevitable is that the homosexual movement will spare nothing politically to accomplish a deeply personal demand: Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Actually, it’s entirely appropriate that the politicization of science in support of homosexuality began within the APA. It was there, in the profession most relevant to the psychological pain management of practicing homosexuals, that the war for legitimacy had to begin. That war rages on. Today, it’s the Boy Scouts of America on the chopping block. Tomorrow, it will be The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and every other orthodox religion.

Ultimately, the fight for “gay rights” will have to kick in the door of religious freedom. It’s inevitable – and inevitable because the psyche of homosexuality cannot tolerate a single voice reminding it that what it does is not natural, normal or healthy.